David Mabberley and Australian Botany

Gardens’ Bulletin Singapore 71(Suppl. 2):7-24. 2019 7 doi: 10.26492/gbs71(suppl. 2).2019-03 David Mabberley and Australian botany B. G. Briggs & K. L. Wilson National Herbarium of New South Wales, Royal Botanic Gardens and Domain Trust, Mrs Macquaries Road, Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia. [email protected] ABSTRACT. David Mabberley has worked on five continents but chose Australia as his home, moving there in 1996. By then, he already had an outstanding international reputation and his contributions to Australian botany and Australian botanical history had started with his biographies of botanist Robert Brown and botanical artist Ferdinand Bauer. Joseph Banks, Brown and Bauer have remained continuing interests for him with further publications and lectures. In Australia he has contributed to the treatments of Meliaceae and Rutaceae in the Flora of Australia, drawn attention to the work of John Bidwill and other botanical figures, established important collaborations on the phylogeny and diseases of Citrus, investigated Red Cedar (Toona ciliata), given master classes in economic botany, and much more. Moving to Australia did not deflect David from his global reach in tropical botany, the world’s flora in The Plant-book, and economically important plants. He has contributed greatly to Australian botany, but his career of outstanding achievement continues to be global, not limited to a single continent. Keywords. Australia, Ferdinand Bauer, John Bidwill, Joseph Banks, Robert Brown, systematic botany Introduction As a researcher and educator, David Mabberley has worked on five continents, including both the Old and the New World tropics. He was based in Britain, his birth- place, for the early stages of his career but he later chose Australia as his home. He first visited briefly in 1974 after fieldwork in Papua New Guinea and moved to Australia in 1996. Since then he has continued a career of outstanding achievement. There was previously a substantial Australian element in his studies, but this intensified after his move to Sydney. In 1996 David already had a formidable international reputation and his publication list was truly impressive. There were two editions of a book on tropical rain forest ecology (Mabberley, 1983, 1991), the text for the second completed on a Polish freighter sailing from Europe to Sydney in 1989, on his way to take up a visiting scholarship at the University of Sydney. He had also published a masterly biography of Robert Brown (Mabberley, 1985), a treatment of Meliaceae for the Flora Malesiana (Mabberley et al., 1995), and had taken on the world’s plants in The Plant-book. A portable dictionary of the higher plants (Mabberley, 1987), as well as publishing many papers in scientific journals. David had done extensive fieldwork in Africa, Asia and 8 Gard. Bull. Singapore 71 (Suppl. 2) 2019 Australasia, and been Dean of Wadham College for ten years, keeper of the excellent Wadham College gardens, and curator of the Oxford University Herbaria. Moving to Australia has made little change in the directions or pace of David’s research. He has continued research and publication in systematic botany, economic botany, botanical history and botanical art. Robert Brown and Ferdinand Bauer, the Investigator voyagers David has had a long-term fascination with Sir Joseph Banks and his protégés, particularly those who visited or lived in colonial Australia. His practical knowledge of botany has been combined with extensive historical ‘detective work’ investigating and interpreting archival materials in many herbaria, museums and libraries, particularly in London, Vienna and Sydney. In his biography of Brown, Jupiter Botanicus (Mabberley, 1985), David set Robert Brown’s Australian botany in the context of his life and the global range of his work, with a detailed account of the Investigator voyage around Australia and Brown’s time in the colony. After the voyage, Brown (1810a) had included some 2000 Australian species in his Prodromus, three quarters of them newly described (Stearn, 1960). This was a huge advance in knowledge of Australia’s flora. William Stearn (1960) and David both emphasised the importance of the Prodromus also for adopting the then modern system of classification of Jussieu (1789) rather than the sexual system of Linneaus. After the Prodromus, Brown was repeatedly drawn back to Australian botany, as covered by David in his account of Brown’s life and work. On the Proteaceae of Jussieu (Brown, 1810b) was a masterful account of a family important in the Australian flora. It is a significant contribution to the systematics and morphology of Proteaceae, the floristics of Australia, and notable also for its application of palynology to systematics. It included 18 new genera, and nearly all of these are still upheld. Other publications on Australian botany by Brown included his Appendix to Flinders’ journal (Brown, 1814), description of Kingia (Brown, 1826), the Supplementum primum to the Prodromus (Brown, 1830), description of the botany ‘of the vicinity of Swan River’ [the present-day Perth region] (Brown, 1831), a botanical appendix to Captain Sturt’s expedition (Brown, 1848) and more [as discussed by Mabberley (1985)]. For Brown, these studies and publications were interspersed with monographs, his preferred style of work, and his microscopic observations on ‘Brownian motion’ and the cell nucleus. In Jupiter Botanicus, David thoroughly and expertly assessed the context and significance of each. Ferdinand Bauer’s paintings of plants and animals from the Investigator voyage around Australia are outstanding examples of botanical and zoological art (Watts et al., 1997; Mabberley, 1999a). He was ‘perhaps the greatest natural history artist ever to work in the field – as opposed to merely the studio’ (Mabberley, 2017a). In his publications on the career and art of Bauer (Mabberley, 1999a, 2017a; Mabberley & Moore, 1999; Pignatti-Wikus et al., 2000) and in lectures, David has described the unique numbering system Bauer used in the field to record about 1,000 colours so that David Mabberley and Australian botany 9 his drawings could become brilliant paintings completed much later in London. He has collaborated on two major exhibitions of Bauer’s art in Sydney: in 1997 at the Museum of Sydney (Watts et al., 1997) and the State Library of New South Wales in 2017 (Fig. 1). For Painting by numbers: the life and art of Ferdinand Bauer (Mabberley, 2017a), he was awarded the John Thackray Medal for 2018 of the Society for the History of Natural History. In the Society’s newsletter, it was described as ‘a marvellous work that has answered, with great conviction, a long-standing unanswered question. How did Bauer manage to achieve, in his final finished works, such beautiful colour accuracy, given that some of his field sketches had been made many years previously?’ The bicentenary of Matthew Flinders’ circumnavigation of the continent on the Investigator in 1801–1803, with Robert Brown as naturalist and Ferdinand Bauer as natural history artist, was celebrated in 2001. David, biographer of both Brown and Bauer, was uniquely knowledgeable as he joined other systematic botanists at the ‘Investigator Symposium’ at Albany, Western Australia. There he launched books on Brown (Vallance et al., 2001) and Allan Cunningham (Curry et al., 2001) and also gave the first lectures in a major series. At the request of the Australian Systematic Botany Society, and with support from the Austrian Government in recognition of Bauer’s Austrian nationality, he undertook a remarkable series of lectures on Brown and Bauer at centres around Australia, following the route of the Investigator. Between Albany in December 2001 and Darwin in early 2003, David gave 22 lectures in 16 locations distributed around all Australian states and territories. These were not confined to capital cities but included in Queensland, for example, Gladstone, Townsville, Cairns and Weipa, and were in venues as diverse as a grand meeting room in a major conference centre and the Great Gallery of the Museum of Tropical Queensland in Townsville to outdoors under the stars on the banks of the Pennefather River within sight of a Brown landing site (Fig. 2). The Pennefather (the Coen River of Brown specimens and Flinders’ charts) was the site of the only landings by Brown on the mainland of Cape York Peninsula. An expedition team comprising about 20 entomologists, zoologists, ornithologists and a geomorphologist, supported by members of the Royal Geographical Society of Queensland, used Flinders’ log, Brown’s diary and recent air photographs and satellite imagery to locate the landing sites. The expedition and associated lecture were timed to coincide with the anniversary of the Investigator’s visit, and the State Library of New South Wales travelling exhibition Matthew Flinders: The Ultimate Voyage opened at Weipa on the same day. This visit also gave David a chance to become reacquainted with some of the Meliaceae he had worked on many years earlier and to be introduced to a couple of new species in the QRS Herbarium in Atherton (Clarkson, 2002). As always, David’s lectures were wide-ranging, scholarly, lively, splendidly illustrated and with humorous touches — always very well received. In Albany, Sydney and several places in Queensland, he was thrilled to visit areas where Brown had botanised and which were scarcely changed from 200 years earlier. As he described it (Mabberley, 2003) ‘perhaps it was Queensland, where I gave more lectures than anywhere else, that had the ‘hairs-on-the-back-of-the-neck’ experience: to cross by boat with John Clarkson the Pennefather River and to scramble up the shore with 10 Gard. Bull. Singapore 71 (Suppl. 2) 2019 Robert Brown’s list of plants seen there two hundred years before and to be able to tick them off as we moved into the woodlands — it was almost surreal. And on top of that to be the first botanists to collect since he had been there exactly two hundred years before!’ In Sydney David’s lectures coincided with the Robert Brown 200 Symposium at the Royal Botanic Gardens in May 2002, for which he was a member of the organising committee.

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